teemur

We need to think that there is two oil prices. one the producer gets and another the consumer pays. High producer price is the worst thing that can happen from climate change perspective. That means also the more difficult to extract oilfields become profitable and then oil in also those will be extracted and burned. If we get the producer oil price to say $5 per barrel, I guarantee you oil production will collapse to almost nothing. Obviously consumer oil price can't be $5 unless there is something still cheaper and better (hard) or taxation/emissions trading schemes that make consumers pay much more than what producer gets.

I'm not sure coding has ever been the hard part. Hard part (to me) has always been to be smart enough to know what, exactly, I (or somebody else) want. Or has someone heard of a case when someone says something like "These requirements are perfectly clear and unambiguous and do not have any undefined edge/corner cases. But implementing that is still really hard, much harder than what producing this unicorn requirements spec was"?

> The two-party system is fine.

Is it? Many western countries are having more or less prominent populist right wing movements, and the two countries I can think of where that movement has gotten its hand in power on really significant issues during the last decade or so are UK and US. Both strongly two party systems at the time of the "interesting" developments. And I do not think a two party system is typical, I am sure there are some countries happily trodding along with their two political parties, but they are not the rule.

> Is that the extent of your requirements (for now, at least) ?

Well, if you ask my other wishes, once Europe has gotten its act straight and decides to tax/tariff/regulate/whatever (american) big tech to hell and back, I kind of would expect that any decent person on that side of the pond would just humbly nod their head and note that, yes, we/they deserved it.

Yep. I don't know if anyone is interested in anecdotes, but looking from Europe, I will do my best to avoid any kind of US dependency until US has a) overhauled the legal system starting from the Supreme Court and b) gotten rid of the de facto two-party system. (No, one-party system does not count.)

I'm too lazy, but I hope someone is less lazy and would set up a Kickstarter and collect funds to be given to every resident of US Virgin Islands once they rejoined[1] Denmark. Would happily chip in a hundred or two for a good cause.

[1] Just learned that US Virgin islands are ex Danish colony US bought from Denmark about a century ago. In that agreement United States recognized Denmark's control over Greenland. Funny that.

I think a decent middle ground would be to allow contextual advertising and ban personalized advertising. That is, it would be fine to show you ads based on where you are, what you are doing or what you are searching on the internet, but not based on what you did on another website or where you had lunch yesterday.

Of course this would add friction for finding the appropriate targets but it would still allow pretty decent business for adtech. it just would be a bit different.

(I'm pretty sure that the line between contextual and personalized ads is blurry, but I leave that to be solved by lawmakers and judges. Its kind of their core competence. And to be clear, what I personally think should be done would be much, much stricter ban, but this is a compromise proposal I think should be agreeable by all parties who are the slightest interested in the harm current adtech is doing)

Don't forget Germany. If you look at the amount of PV built in Germany early this century and make some admittedly strong assumptions about learning curve, one could argue the Energiewende, then usually called failure, singlehandedly accelerated PV development by decades. I don't recall Germany ever credited on that.

I wonder if one could write a skill called something like "Ask the damn user" that the model could use when e.g. all needed files are not in the context.

The whole of trumps first stint?

For this year's numbers there are two possible stories that come to my mind:

1. The jobs are going ~constantly downhill and any new, revised number is going to be worse than previous

2. There is a conspiracy and initially the numbers are systematically inflated and/or afterwards deflated because reasons... that are completely incomprehensible to me. I don't even understand if this conspiracy theory should be pro or against trump.

> People will have less or no motivation to create them

Not sure if we surf the same internets... In the web I am surfing, the more "motivation" (trying to get ad revenue) the author has, the crappier the content is. If I want to find high quality information, invariably I am seeking authors with no "motivation" whatsoever to produce the content (wikipedia, hacker news, reddit with a heavy filter etc.) I'm pretty sure we would be better off if the whole ad industry vanished.

> Is this situation in any way realistic one?

No, it's much worse than that. In real life you talk about pages and pages of documents and power points and meetings after meetings if you happen to need a computer/server/configuration that's not in the pre-approved list. (I really wish I was exaggerating. And of course no, not all employers are like this to state the obligatory obvious.)

> We know that universal solutions can’t exist and that all practical solutions require exotic high-dimensionality computational constructs that human brains will struggle to reason about. This has been the status quo since the 1980s. This particular set of problems is hard for a reason.

This made me a bit curious. Would you have any pointers to books/articles/search terms if one wanted to have a bit deeper look on this problem space and where we are?

If you can identify blocks of code you need to write that are easy to define reasonably well, easy to review/verify that it is written correctly but still burdensome to actually write, LLMs are your new best friend. I don't know about how other people think/write, but I seem to have a lot of that kind of stuff on my table. The difficult part to outsource to LLMs is how to connect these easy blocks, but luckily thats the part I find fun in coding, not so much writing the boring simple stuff.

Rent-seeking is a pretty well-known term that has not much to do with rents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

"Paying" is a bit too ambiguous term. Let's say we go to have a lunch, but I forgot my wallet at the office. You pay my lunch and once we are back at the office, I pay you back. Who paid my lunch, you or me? Your company pays VAT in the technical sense you paid my lunch and your company does not pay VAT in the economical sense I paid my lunch.

I think you can work around that messaging restriction by requesting desktop site from the mobile browser. Not saying it is not irritating, though.

Is there a way to know beforehand if the e-book from Kobo is DRM or not? I thought they were all DRM free, but the last book I bought suddenly was DRM and haven't yet bothered to research (I have a couple of different size e-readers and just copying the file over has been handy.)

Interesting. Could you provide a better alternative? Preferably even remotely as user friendly as signal/whatsapp?

Oh, that video brought memories. I wonder if there is any good content about low code fallacy or cloud?

What would you recommend instead for the ones that would be interested to start learning robotics stuff? (Not trying to be snarky but actually curious)

My low, low priority side project has been to make a VR app that lets you (create and) move around 4d environments. I'm pretty sure that navigating even moderately complex 4d environment can be used as some kind of proof for 4d visualization/intuition capabilities. Level 6 on my toy maze game has all of 4 tesseracts within the maze tesseracts and after some hours of playing, I am still completely lost there.

If someone wants to have a look, feel free (but it is hard. You need time. If you do not have vr headsets but want to have a look, you can install browser add-ons thet let you simulate vr headset and controls):

https://www.brainpaingames.com/Hypershack.html

I have been planning to write a Show HN any day now for months, but maybe someday.

Won't help on dirt and rain (and limited help on upwind and uphill) but using a low enough gear you should be able to stroll around with similar strain as walking. And you need to be able to accept a slightly slower speed, which is often challening, at least for me.

There is also a somewhat amusing argument that cycling does not waste your time. you get every hour cycled back as hour added to your expected lifetime:

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/10/12/cycling-add-year...

I have been working on a project that puts you moving around and in 4d objects in VR:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100760

It's really crude at this point, but I am "close" (who knows, days, weeks or months, those last few issues may contain awesome rabbit holes...) to be able to publish next version that would have

- moving and rotations using vr controllers instead of keyboard which is a bit of pain in the ass

- double rotations

- javascript programmable 4d objects (by player, that is.) letting you to create your own dynamic 4d world where to move in.

> road wear and tire wear and hence micro plastics, scale to the fourth with vehicle weight,

(Emphasis mine) Do you have a source for this? I do not see how this specific claim could be true, and I am not sure how exactly that needs to be modified to make it true.

I mean, if you take a vehicle that weights one ton and double the number of wheels, that specific claim says that the road/tire wear would not change, as the vehicle weight stays the same. Further, doubling the wheels can't easily be distinguished from splitting the load to two vehicles with half the weight, which should reduce wear & tear of each vehicle to one sixteenth, totaling to one eighth. So there is kind of a contradiction.

And as a sanity check, a passenger car weights ~10^3 kg. A large truck weights ~10^4. So a truck would wear the road something like as much as 10 000 passenger cars. That's a bit hard to believe.

So the actual law might be something like tear & wear scales to the fourth of the weight on a single wheel. But even that leaves something to hope, as I think you need to assume similar wheels. So maybe the actual law has something to do with pressure on the road?

Sorry, what does "structuring financial transactions" mean in this context?

Do you use or have you considered using potential energy as energy storage? That is, using the solar power in daytime to climb higher and glide lower during night time?

> and the massive productivity benefits you see (30x faster!) are for trivial tasks, not difficult tasks.

Okay, I'll bite. I think quite often solving difficult tasks contain lots of trivial tasks. And speeding the trivial tasks can speed the difficult task up considerably when you can outsource the trivial tasks to an LLM.

I do not know how to make a catchy short video on my last side project scratching my itch (VR environment/metaverse to build 4 dimensional objects and move around them in 4d, see https://www.brainpaingames.com if interested). It was multi-year thing to get it where it is now (not pretty yet, I admit...), and it may of course just me being dumb, but yes, I consider it was/is difficult. Especially given I have never done anything in either C# or Unity. The speed-up ChatGPT gave to this project during last half a year was absolutely not trivial. I guess I must have saved years of my limited side-project time to get this far.

Well, I did a show HN a couple of days ago, so technically it might be published, but given how raw state the project is still in, I do not consider it a big mistake to put it here as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100760

(Hypersprawl/Hypershack is a metaverse/playground in 4 spatial dimensions. where you can upload your 4 dimensional objects and move around and in them. more info in the show HN or https://brainpaingames.com)